Nop,

I'm referring to the delete button but also to the
make-square, make-round and rotate options. You do not need these to draw
streets on top of tracks or aerial imagery, which is the basic start of
mapping.

Quite a few people start with tracing buildings nowadays, a task for which this functionality is very important. By no means should "tracing of buildings" be an "expert task"!

(It would be cool if the "make square" tool would reject the making square of very un-square things like roundabouts, but all our other editors will happily square a circle for you so it would be a bit unfair to demand different from iD I think.)

I tried deleting a few things and there was no warning that I was acting
destructively. The warning before saving is too general and the list of
change objects also does not indicate whether I did something dangerous.

Our current entry-level editor, Potlatch 2, doesn't "warn that you're acting destructively" when deleting objects either. A couple good ideas have been floated about reducing the trash-can prominence in iD; don't you think that might already solve the problem?

I believe that immediate warnings when you do something dangerous (and an
expert switch to disable them later) would be very helpful to prevent damage
and teach the user how to proceed.

I think one shouldn't be religious about warnings/questions/popup messages - sure it's a UI challenge to do them well but simply not doing them at all, ever, doesn't automatically mean you have a good UI. However, a pop-up message every time you have deleted something would surely be stretching it!

--> Going off on a tangent here and leaving the scope of immediate iD improvements - someone else has posted that a while ago in a different discussion. Maybe we are far too obsessed with trying to make sure nothing is ever broken in an edit session. Maybe we should focus more on post-processing of edits. Give users the option of saying "I'd like someone else to review my edit". If user does that, a special tag ("review=yes") is set on the changeset. A list/map of such "changesets for review" could then be generated and processed by users who are interested in helping. Before too long we'll have feature where changesets can be commented/discussed which would go nicely with this.

What's more, the existing icons would confuse me as a newcomer.

Then again, only real newcomers count in that department - of course *my* first time with iD was confusing because I was used to other editors, and it will have been no different with you.

I agree with the previous posts that OSM should not create a connection to
Facebook, Twitter or any other social service without conscious choice by
the user

There seems to be a potential solution to this - making these things into "post-edit plugins" that the user would activate. The open question is whether the current options (FB, Twitter) should be shelved until plugins are available, or kept live until plugins are available. There's a github issue here https://github.com/systemed/iD/issues/1706 - tmcw has already said that the issue is low priority on his side but of course anybody else with Javascript proficiency for whom this is a high priority could chip in with a pull request any time!

Bye
Frederik

--
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"

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